Anyone remember when you could run heroics in Burning Crusade, and given some time, get some cool pieces of badge gear? I loved the axe I got, even if it did appear to be a hunter weapon.

Apparently, not working as intended! You might think that at level 70 killing a boss in a BC heroic would give justice points, the replacement for badges. You'd be wrong! Instead, they don't. Thankfully, you can run random dungeons, which wowhead says do give justice points. At level 70 you cannot queue for the normals and are instead limited to the heroics, which supposedly are seven times weekly. There are also the daily dungeon quests for 10 each, bringing the total to 20 points per day. Bosses should give 5 each, but if anyone in the group is above 70, which thanks to the dungeon finder they often are, no points. That means either a very, very slow process of manually forming groups for rarely-run content or a lot of voting to kick people who have done nothing wrong.

The net result is that any gear is absurdly expensive and slow to acquire. At level 70. But hit 85 and run all the randoms you want with bosses dropping the proper points and the tool giving even more, and then go back and buy it all. Because that makes sense. Would it have been so difficult to leave badges of justice alone? Had Blizzard done exactly nothing, there would be no problem. New content would use the justice/valor system and BC would use its old badge system. No overlap, no potential for exploitation, no bugs to worry about. If level 85 players suddenly decide they want level 70 gear for transmogrification, then add a one-way justice->badge vendor, similar to honor. As for the LK heroics, screwing up LK content is entirely consistent with Blizzard's past actions, so there's nothing to worry about.

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in other news: I tried to play the game where my DK tanked as frost. And WTF it is almost impossible. CLEARLY Blizzard needs to fix this! I mean, if they had left frost as a tank specc there would have been no problem (for me). Now I have to settle with wiping groups over and over, or to kick any who claim that I am not in the right tanking gear.

I've been following Klepsacovic's recent posts with morbid curiosity. I could be wrong, but I think that this latest stunt has brought to light what he's really on about. He is just building up to a dramatic ragequit and I think that it's dishonest to his readers to go through all of this song and dance to get there.

I don't understand this impulse among a significant sector of the former WoW blogosphere to come up with ever more creative ways of bashing WoW. Moving on would be healthier for all involved. Yes, the game has changed a lot and so have the players. I used to put in 12-15, even 20 hours a week, where now I raid 2 nights a week for a total of 5 hours, occasionally spending an hour or three to level or gear an alt. I still enjoy it, but not in the same way I enjoyed raiding during BC and LK. The difference is as much about how I've changed, both in my habits and expectations, as it is about how the game itself has changed.

Some people would love to have a reason to spend 20 or more hours a week in the game. I certainly don't, which might be the reason that I'm not rebelling against how "casual" WoW has become. I put that extra leisure time into other activities that have become important to me, such as writing. Sure, there are times that I'm nostalgic for the good times when I was raiding Karazhan on multiple characters (and only got through half the TBC raiding content, but didn't care), but there is nothing that Blizzard can do that would bring that back, and even if they did, I'm not going to put that much of my life into this game, ever again.

It might be time to let go, and either except that the game and its players have changed, irrevocably, or let your account lapse and move on.

"Is it so difficult to imagine that someone could play a game, enjoy it, but still have criticisms?"

No, because that is me. I think that Blizzard has made mistakes. Some of them can't be rolled back, like reducing the difficulty of heroics, eliminating atunements and making previous raid tiers obsolete and pointless within an expansion. This last drastically reduced the thickness of the content and, in my mind, was the main driver for creating multiple raid difficulties later on. Cataclysm attempted to roll some of these back and the result was disastrous. Other issues, though, could be addressed next expansion.

I think it was the post "LFR: It's like LFD with 20 trash-talking bots" that got me thinking that you are playing a big joke on us. LFR is what it is, an answer to the question: How can I PuG raids? Your overly critical analysis of it, and the assertion that you'd be better off watching youtube for the content than actually playing through it made it sound as if you were done with WoW, right then and there.

Please, prove my assertion wrong, but it has been hard to see any enjoyment coming out of that much cynicism.

I think level 19 BGs are a huge mess and I'd never want to play them. Is that going to make me quit? No. I just don't play that content. Similarly, I don't use LFR because it isn't fun. I don't expect to enjoy every single aspect of the game. It would be nice if LFR was better (if that is possible) or if PvP was easier to get into, but I can still enjoy the game even without those.

In that very same post I said that the LFD content was fun. I made no comment on guild raids (I still need to try those). My more recent posts have been positive about the leveling game (except Desolace). Before the LFR post I was positive about ZG.

If you think I'm biased, well sure, I'm biased. If you think I'm being dishonest, well that's too bad. Read my posts with paranoia if that makes them more interesting, but recognize your own bias.

The change meant the demise for several TBC-Guilds, and changes like this are the reason why 'Just Lock your XP' doesn't really work, leading people to ask for the option to pay to play on rollback-servers.